Janet Yellen’s is a name most Americans will recognize, even if they’re not quite sure why. She’s the former chair of the Federal Reserve and the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and now, she’s been nominated to serve as Joe Biden’s Treasury Secretary.
If confirmed, Yellen will assume her new role during one of the greatest economic crises in a century. How would she guide Biden through the storm?
Guest: Jordan Weissman, Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent.
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Motivation is important for a number of reasons, but how and why it works can be misunderstood. In his best-selling book Smarter, Faster, Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg shares how motivation can be a learned skill.
Some of the most popular agricultural biotech products are running into problems. These plants have been genetically modified to fend off insects, and have been great for the environment and for farmers. But now they are not working as well. NPR food and agriculture correspondent Dan Charles explains the rise and potential fall of Bt crops, and what happens when farmers use too much of a good thing.
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The moral horrors of genocide and mass atrocity lead us to wonder how such things are even possible. A common and understandable reaction is to see events of this kind as arising from the collapse and eventual disappearance of norms. That is, because we find genocide and mass atrocity so difficult to comprehend, we grasp for an explanation that ascribes to such episodes the absence of compressibility.
In Unconscionable Crimes: How Norms Explain and Constrain Mass Atrocity (MIT 2020), Paul Morrow argues against this tendency. On his view, instances of mass atrocity often reflect the presence, rather than the absence, of norms. Paul Morrow argues that recognizing the moral, legal, and social norms governing mass atrocity can help prevent its occurrence.
Biden officially announced several top members of his economic team, including his picks to lead the Treasury, White House Council of Economic Advisers, and the Office of Management and Budget. We talk about the picks and what it says about Biden's economic priorities.
Moderna submitted its vaccine for FDA authorization yesterday, following Pfizer’s submission a couple weeks ago. The CDC is holding an emergency meeting today to hammer out some guidelines for states on who should get their COVID shots first.
And in headlines: SCOTUS hears arguments on Trump’s plan to keep undocumented immigrants out of the census count, a London lab uses AI to predict the shapes of proteins, and Spiderman is able to have in-person school in Atlanta.
The military strength of the United States again is rated as only “marginal” in a new report, the "2021 Index of U.S. Military Strength", from The Heritage Foundation.
Russia is identified as the main threat to the U.S., but China is identified in the report as “the most comprehensive threat that the U.S. faces, [and] continues to modernize and expand its military and pay particular attention to its space, cyber, and artificial intelligence capabilities.” How should these challenges be addressed?
Dakota Wood, senior research fellow for The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense and the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss.
We also cover these stories:
Biotechnology company Moderna is asking the Food and Drug Administration to give it an emergency authorization for the coronavirus vaccine.
The results of Georgia’s presidential election continue to be contested.
The White House is ready for Christmas! First lady Melania Trump announces that the theme for this year’s decor is "America the Beautiful."
Alligators, crocodiles and … a shut-down nuclear weapons plant? The excitement never ends when you’re Laura Kojima, an Alligator Ecotoxicologist. A longtime reptile cheerleader, Laura has passion to match some truly bananas stories about field work, tail smacks, gator jaws, mercury levels, swamp boats, and crocodilian evolution, overbites, and locomotion. Her incredible work keeps people -- and the gators -- safer in toxic waters and she recalls her favorite alligator bite and the one animal that sent her to the hospital. Also discussed: jorts & gator crotches.
[Audio note: the connection was a little spotty so please forgive occasional static!]
Amanda Holmes reads Galway Kinnell’s poem, “Wait.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
Friend of the show Randall Eliason wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post called "The case against indicting Trump." Both of us on the show strongly disagree with the arguments presented and humbly submit our enthusiastic rebuke of it.
Before that, Andrew answers the clickbaity question of whether or not Trump made a major mistake in pardoning Flynn. As with all clickbait, the answer is no. Finally, we briefly touch on the terrible new decision out of the Amy Coney Barrett era that is our new hell.
